It was zealously opposed by the representatives of New
England in Congress and in the home legislatures; and in many pulpits
hands were lifted to God in humble entreaty that the curse and bane of
democracy, an offshoot of the rabid Jacobinism of revolutionary France,
might not be permitted to take root and overshadow the goodly heritage of
Puritanism. The alarmists of the South, in their most fervid pictures of
the evils to be apprehended from the prevalence of anti-slavery doctrines
in their midst, have drawn nothing more fearful than the visions of such
"Prophets of war and harbingers of ill"
as Fisher Ames in the forum and Parish in the desk, when contemplating
the inroads of Jeffersonian democracy upon the politics, religion, and
property of the North.
But great numbers of the free laborers of the Northern States, the
mechanics and small farmers, took a very different view of the matter.
The doctrines of Jefferson were received as their political gospel. It
was in vain that federalism denounced with indignation the impertinent
inconsistency of slave-holding interference in behalf of liberty in the
free states.
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